Even the original k8s codebase was notoriously horrible in Go, and that was "from the source".
Ironically, HashiCorp has a better Go codebase, and that's where I picked best practices from, not from Google.
The problem with Go is that the Googlers fail to challenge some of the design decisions. The giants of computer science working on it at the company cannot be questioned, and that just leads to a broken feedback process.
As someone said, Go is the new C, skipping decades of new language design concepts.
Well, they can be questioned but they're not very receptive to it, so most people don't bother. During my time at Alphabet I didn't see much use of Go anyways, other than in glue tooling (including a horrific large-scale incident due to non-obvious behaviour of Go code in such a glue tool).
Well, some are doomed to repeat their errors.
In fact C was even crappy for it's own time.
How is Go not suited to those? I'm not seeing it - and are you comparing Go to Java or C++?